Long distance on hold, to get worse

Long distance on hold, to get worse
ENS Economic Bureau

New Delhi, Sept 19: With telecom unions continuing their agitation over pay and other issues, long distance telecom traffic in the country remained badly affected today as well. Both the Junior Engineer Telecome Association (JETA) and Indian Telecom Service Association (ITSA) are on a `work to rule' agitation. While JETA has a support base of 26,000 to 30,000 employees, ITSA has 8,000 officer-level members.

These association want their services anomolies to be sorted out before the government declared date of October 1, to turn the department of telecom operations into a corporation - Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL). These association have step up their agitations further because of appointment of an IAS officers as a director on the BSNL Board. This, they say, is a back door entry of an IAS officers and in a field which is specifically for technical telecom officers. JETA has been agitating for almost one month now while the ITSA has been agitating for about a week. The situation is likely to worsen over the next ten days unless the government can resolve their demands.

The eastern sector is the worst hit with no long distance calls being connected to any of the states in the region since morning, a top department of telecom official told PTI. Network problems were also being reported from western and southern regions, officials said.

Communications minister Ram Vilas paswan said the problem was being tackled on a war footing. The minister called for a high-level meeting to assess the problem andhas promised that `all network problems would be fixed latest by tonight and the long-distance communication would be made trouble free from tomorro.'

Meanwhile, the three-day strike by a section of employees of MTNL, Delhi since yesterday also complicated problems in the capital. Frequent call drops and inability to connect to cellular phones have been reported from different parts.